What are they saving when it comes to the health of the residents of the North Caucasus? While doctors complain about a lack of medicines, consumables and a cut in funding for medical institutions, the Accounts Bureau records a decrease in regional budget spending on health.
In the first half of 2026, Russia's regions spent 999 billion rubles on medicine. This is 61 billion rubles less than in the same period last year. The decrease was recorded in 42 regions. What is happening in the North Caucasus?
As expected, there are no reports available on the execution of regional budgets. But the regional authorities in their health care development strategies do not hide the problems at all and admit to themselves the lack of doctors, the lack of modern equipment, the deterioration of the medical infrastructure, problems in the supply of medicines and insufficient availability of specialized care. In Dagestan, hundreds of settlements remain hard to access to emergency medicine. In Ingushetia, a shortage of 392 doctors was officially recognized. In Chechnya, the supply of doctors is significantly lower than the Russian average, and the oncology service experiences a shortage of specialist specialists. In Karachay-Cherkessia, almost every sixth hospital bed is not covered by hospitalizations, and prevention detects chronic diseases less frequently than the national average. There is still no hospital for infectious diseases in North Ossetia, and the main building of the oncology clinic, built in 1986, needs reconstruction. In the Stavropol territory, only half of the staff positions in the hospitals are filled with doctors. Against this background, the question of reducing health spending in general sounds - how shall I say it - a disaster. If the health infrastructure is already strained by personnel, technical and organizational constraints, what implications will additional savings have on patients?